Take a tour of Stephen Robin’s house and woodworking shop, and your eyes will pop out at almost every twist and turn. You’ll find stunningly artistic and strikingly functional wood creations — beds, cabinets, desks, tables — greeting you at almost every corner, much of it built by the hands of this master craftsman. Throughout his long career, some of it fashioned on a giant CNC (computer numerical control) machine purchased partially with forestry grant money.
“I’ve been in business since 1967 continuously. I think you’ll find that I’m the oldest woodworker in Ulster County that’s been continuous,” said Robin. “There’s been a lot of people that came and went, like Harry Sanger before me. Don’t forget, I’m 85, and I believe I’m on top of my game. I believe that, and I believe that what I do in the next couple of years will be really cool. At least I’m looking forward to it.”
Robin hopes to open a gallery on his property with an entrance on Route 212 near Easton Lane in the next few months.
His guidance of the tour evokes a characteristic fount of enthusiasm. “The sign you see is a temporary one .… You walk up the path there .… We’re working on the property until it’s pristine ….
“We’ll have Ed Martin sculptures outside. I want to show his stuff, so his family can get the money,” he says, and then goes on. “This is from the old days. That’s going to be our sculpture courtyard over there. This stuff [pointing to sleek pieces stashed in odd corners of the house] is just overflow because there’s no room to put it in the shop.”
And he points to more. “This is stuff we made a long time ago, and will eventually sell this furniture. Here’s a little gallery entrance, it’s fairly formidable .…”
Ah, the old days. That’s where I first met Stephen, early Seventies, when I manned a booth for him at a crafts fair. The booth had a magnificent desk taking up most of its space. Of course, everyone wanted to know the price, and of course Stephen, the same enigmatic contrarian he is today, refused to put a number on it.
“C’mon, you gotta know …” they’d say, and I could only laugh and shrug.
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“The trajectory of my life,” explains Robin, “in general has been, the first ten years of doing this, I was a furniture maker. Then I was a house builder, had a shop that worked for other builders and other makers, a general guy for hire. In ’86 I built my cousin Freddy a house up in Grog Kill …. Built a house in Amagansett for Stanley Diller. I ran this job.”
Working with others
The elegant quality of his work is on display in different locales you might run into.
“When you were doing the craft shows,” Robin tells me, “I was showing with the best of them, the big names of furniture. After two or three years of making stuff, I came out like gangbusters. We’re talking 1968, 1970. I basically had ten years to do essentially what I wanted.
“I had Eric Brugnoni running a frame shop which I owned, and he basically supported me for a good amount of time. I had a show at the Brooklyn Museum. Schenectady Museum. There’s something called the DeCordova Museum .…
“I was able to do whatever I wanted to do, independent of making anything anyone would buy. I was invited around and I had a promising career as an art-furniture maker but no money to support a family. So I went to work for Belmont Towbin, a financier, and I basically had an A-list clientele that had a lot of money, and I built houses and I built furniture. The last ten years we worked for this one guy, who never wants me to mention his name, we’re not particularly friendly anymore but we still work for him…
“So I’m not saying I know everything, but I know my way around plumbing, electrical, running people … these people who work with me, they all like me. I try to keep people happy.”
Robin has independent contractors working with him, all of whom run their own businesses out of their own shops. “We’re more like a co-op,” says Robin.
There’s Steven Liebowitz of NY Fab Shop, Matthew Medenbach of Woodstock CNC Woodworking; James Mayer of Mayer Construction; and craftsman Gary Rawlins.
“What I’m going to do is start building furniture that I want to build and load the gallery up and see what I can do, and let the business go on. On our website [www.stephenrobinwoodworking.com] there’s a portfolio section that shows everything, the art furniture, the art that we made for the Woodstock Jewish Congregation Temple, to everything we made for Bard College’s library [to house and display Alan Sussman’s donated rare book collection], and it shows the staircase we made last year for Family of Woodstock in Kingston.
“They had an 1850 staircase, very ornate, and it ended on the first floor, and the finance people at Family are in the basement, and Michael Berg [Family’s executive director] wanted the basement and rest of the building to be connected, so he commissioned us to build a staircase. So we built a railing and all of those twists and turns. and Jim Mayer was the lead person on staircase design for Family.”
We go into the shop
“It’s a conventional wood shop, but it’s loaded with every imaginable tool. This is my stash of Japanese stuff. Then over here …” He pulls open shallow drawers, filled with chisels.
Tools? Robin’s stream of consciousness flows as he tests a chisel. “Hundreds. In the best of all worlds, you see, it’s not always perfect … but you can see that it’s like a razor … so we try, and all of them are as good as the rest of them. But generally speaking I would say if I really counted they’re all that good … mostly, not always, but most of them are pretty good. All of what you see here are essentially conventional woodworking tools.”
We watch cutting being done by the CNC machine.
“There’s a client in Stone Ridge who makes this furniture out of plastic, and all the pieces are interlocked.”
The CNC machine consists of a table, maybe ten to twelve feet long, maybe eight feet wide with a computer-run cutting tool. “What it does is, it takes the material, whatever it is, picks it up and cuts what’s in the program. That block of wood [he points] is going to become a three-seat loveseat, curved to fit the contour of your back, and that’s all going to be from drawings.”
The $150,000 machine was purchased in 2007 utilizing a $43,000 matching grant facilitated by congressman Maurice Hinchey from the U.S. Forest Service and the Watershed Agricultural Council’s (WAC) forestry program.
“Curves are as easy to cut as straight lines. Complex 3-D structures are relatively easy to produce. Even the number of machining steps that require human action have been dramatically reduced by automation,” Robin says in an article in a WAC online posting (www.nycwatershed.org/forestry/stephen-robin/).
Robin offers CNC machining services to other shops. “In the Woodstock area, there are many guitar builders and woodworking studios like mine who will favor a local alternative,” he said in the WAC article. “Craftsmen spend thousands of dollars to ship products across the U.S. to other shops with the CNC technology. Now, they can save time and money by keeping the wood local.”
“Once upon a time to make a desktop like this required a certain amount of skill,” Robin says back in his office. “Now in probably a couple of hours you can glue it up and take it downstairs, and an hour later you have the top, including the undercuts and everything.”
Keeping life interesting
The tour continues through his living quarters, accompanied briefly by Joany Elliott.
“This is our house. It’s sort of a work in progress, mostly done …”
Stephen: “We made all this stuff…”
Joany: “He made all this stuff…”
Stephen: “Joany has tons of stuff, tchatchkes .… Occasionally some of it gets used.”
She points out a dining-room table with two leaves. Stephen says, “You look underneath, everything is wood. Everything we build looks as good underneath as it does on the bottom as it does on the top.”
He shows off some expert tile work.
“We copied this from Olana…”
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Up more stairs …. Joany’s office, the computers networked…
More tile work in the bathroom. “I’m not a tile guy, I don’t do this professionally, but I can do it. When we were in Italy we copied that, I made that piece by piece.”
Beds, dressers, mirrors, nightstands…
“All this stuff is dovetailed, no nails. Just about everything I make is functionally as good as you can make it. Benches have two mortises, there’s no cheats.”
Robin likes to shoot hoops, so we hoist a couple, though it’s a little muddy outside. And like many old-time Woodstockers, he’s got a couple of Dylan stories to relate, though he doesn’t harp on them.
His daughter is 52 “in Cape Cod, she has a restaurant, a husband and a child…”
“I own a house in Cape Cod next to my daughter,” Stephen said, “I’m gradually fixing up. Little house and outbuilding … and if I have time … well, I find that I have more money than I have time. I’m not going to outlive my money.
“I swim every day for a half-hour with my cousin Freddy Hand. I like biking, motorcycle riding, kayaking. In the winter I ski …. I have a pretty full life. But in my own house I’m embarrassed I don’t have dining-room chairs, so that’s my next project.
“I have two weeks to do a project, then I’m free. I’ve decided I’m retired from anything beyond …. Well, I’m the only guy that knows how to spray-finish, so I do that. But I’m sort of trying to back away from the business …. But if people want to make money, the business has to support itself. If we hit a slow period, I’ll hire everybody to work on furniture, and we’ll spend some money and see what happens. Just, you know, trying to keep life interesting .…”
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